I'm pretty sure this one (N900) is actually a phone though. And uh, there are a bunch of N series phones, see N95, N96, N97, and I think some N80 series too. But I don't actually own any of them, although this N900 is pretty appealing. But in the end I don't think it would function that well as a phone, so I'd prefer to get a Palm Pre or Android device.
You were saying? It's not anything special about Ubuntu, most Linux distros have a package manager. But Ubuntu specifically seems to have a policy of not updating Pidgin except for security issues during releases. I'm surprised you haven't seen this: http://pidgin.im/download/ubuntu/
Yes? It helps to read the Pidgin mailing list. It's generally a good idea to know what you're talking about when talking about security issues, which is something both you and the slashdot story editor failed to do.
No, they're trying to be professional and principled about things. Pidgin is one of the few projects that has standards about versioning, unlike eg. Firefox which goes more along the lines of whatever they feel like bumping the version by. More seriously, Firefox has a longer development cycle between major releases but in general they seem to just bump their version roughly proportionally to the amount of time a release was in development. In Pidgin land, major.minor.x releases are just security/bugfix releases, major.minor releases add features, and major releases break API, or something along those lines. 2.5.9 is a separate line from 2.6, and it's just to patch the vulnerability for those that won't move to the 2.6 line right away.
Nonono, you don't get it. 2.5.9 contains the bug fix for people/distros who don't want to move to a new major release. 2.6.0 was released, but it had a separate bug, so 2.6.1 was released later that day to fix that bug. Either way, most people should be safe, since 2.6.0 hardly had a chance to be recommended.
Err, the bug was already fixed and no vulnerable builds were even built for Windows. And incidentally, it'd be easier to just use the WinPidgin build environment fetcher script and cygwin or msys (I prefer msys) than try to compile it with eclipse, although once you have the environment set up eclipse should be able to use it as a Makefile project.
Well, if you enable the Release Notifications plugin it will tell you about updates. I did once post to the mailing list about adding an auto-update feature, but since Pidgin is multiplatform and a built-in autoupdate doesn't make sense on Linux with package managers, the idea was rejected. But really, the Release Notifications plugin is more or less good enough.
So 2.5.9 is a stability release for distros/maintainers who don't want to upgrade to 2.6.0 for whatever reason. 2.6.0 was released at the same time as 2.5.9 but a bug was immediately found so then they released 2.6.1.
I think you can get free Ubuntu stickers from Canonical, actually. I have one on my laptop, although a friend ordered them and it was a while ago so I don't know if they still do it.
On a related note, I've had kernel panics while installing Arch Linux. Not a knock against Arch at all, I'm really interested in getting it on my machine but the fact is that bad/broken drivers will lock up any OS, and a BSOD is always a hardware issue by design. The only time I've seen a BSOD in the past 8 years or so was recently when I was undervolting my laptop to reduce the heat, but I expected it to happen anyway.
Err, I'm not sure if you were aware, but ARM is on tons of smartphones and PDA type devices and some of them have 288MB of RAM. ARM isn't just for microcontrollers.
This whole thread is hilarious, because I was actually thinking about this last night and I hadn't seen this. I think ARM has a better chance than you think though- Cortex A8 has similar IPC to Atom, sure, but Cortex A9 brings out of order execution and dual cores to ARM, so I think it could really give Atom a run for its money. And the best part is that it'll probably use an order of magnitude less power than Atom. I can't wait for ARM to become a viable desktop platform, and I guess at least with Linux it already is. Once ARM gets fast enough and Microsoft gets some sense and ports Windows to ARM, with perhaps some x86 emulation for "legacy" applications (I want to play Starcraft on ARM, silly, I know) it will be awesome.
Ugly is subjective. On the other hand, I don't know myself but I've seen people mention some feature in VB.Net that isn't in C# every time it comes up that VB.Net is inferior.
Are you serious? File searching was always several orders of magnitude slower than the indexed search in Vista. In XP, I've had the thing open for over an hour looking for a file, whereas with Vista I type the name and get the file almost instantly. I've never had the XP search work usefully for me, and I think I and many people would like to know what you and your coworkers are smoking.
Uh, you're misinformed, if anything, since the Vista rendering system is actually GPU accelerated unlike XP, so it should be faster as long as you have a GPU that isn't more than 5 years old or something. A lot of the stupid things that used to happen in XP, like one application freezing and then dragging another application over it would "paint" the second application over the first, doesn't happen with DWM. It's a technically superior system. The classic style might be fast, but IIRC it's still in Vista and 7 so I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
I've been looking into Arch for a while now, because its ideals seem to appeal to me, but for some reason I always get kernel panics during the install. Do you have any idea what the problem might be? I should just post on the Arch forums, but I'm too lazy to make an account and I've already got a Slashdot account so I might as well ask here.
Is it an HP laptop made in the past couple years with an nVidia chipset? It's widely known now that a lot of them are defective and poorly engineered, which leads to crappy heat dissipation. I'm typing this from another HP laptop with a defective nVidia chipset and "normal" temperatures on this are 50-70C for the CPU and 68-90C for the GPU, which is just insane considering it's a several generations old crappy IGP (Geforce 6150). Even my desktop GPU, which is based on possibly the most power hungry GPU generation (Radeon R600) idles at "only" 50C. The problem with the nVidia chipsets is that the heatsink doesn't actually make contact with the GPU, which is just retarded. And to compound problems, they used some crappy solder that can actually melt at temperatures that the GPU actually can achieve (I think around 100C), which causes the wifi to fail among other things. I agree, I'm also never buying an nVidia again because I've been running my CPU at 800mhz for the past few months to avoid the solder coming off and completely hosing my system. I think HP is fine when they don't use shitty nVidia chipsets, and probably newer nVidia chipsets are fine too, but their handling of this situation has been absolutely horrible.
I agree, anyone who says that learning language X will screw up a person for lifetime is an idiot. The only people who would be "screwed up" are people who aren't good at programming in the first place. And on another note, Java and C# are pretty damn good languages, and even VB.net is supposedly pretty good if you actually give it a chance. I haven't tried it myself, but it's orders of magnitude better than VB6, which is what most people think of when they diss VB.
What are the design flaws? That said, if Norton and McAfee are still doing well now then they'll probably be able to survive this as well, because there have been much better free alternatives to their bloatware and they still seem to be extant. That said, the Symantec online virus database is pretty handy, but their client software is horrible. After switching to Avast, my computers booted 30 seconds faster. It seems like this Security Essentials thing is similarly lower on resource usage than Norton et al; perhaps a surprise coming from Microsoft, but a welcome alternative nonetheless.
That looks pretty cool. I guess part of the problem for me before was that I didn't really have any C experience the last time I tried JNI. I was just trying to compile a small DLL to read an analog sensor from Java where someone else had written the code, and it was just a huge mess. At least now I have more experience with C so I could have figured it out more easily, but the fact remains that it's still a kludgy situation.
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I'm pretty sure this one (N900) is actually a phone though. And uh, there are a bunch of N series phones, see N95, N96, N97, and I think some N80 series too. But I don't actually own any of them, although this N900 is pretty appealing. But in the end I don't think it would function that well as a phone, so I'd prefer to get a Palm Pre or Android device.
Can't you also do it by tapping two fingers? But a multitouch trackpad is a bit different from a single touch touchscreen.
You were saying? It's not anything special about Ubuntu, most Linux distros have a package manager. But Ubuntu specifically seems to have a policy of not updating Pidgin except for security issues during releases. I'm surprised you haven't seen this: http://pidgin.im/download/ubuntu/
In Windows at least, if you press down and hold it turns into a right click after a while. Active digitizer pens also have right click buttons.
Yes? It helps to read the Pidgin mailing list. It's generally a good idea to know what you're talking about when talking about security issues, which is something both you and the slashdot story editor failed to do.
Yes, this is what I've been trying to say all over this thread. The slashdot summary is horribly incorrect.
No, they're trying to be professional and principled about things. Pidgin is one of the few projects that has standards about versioning, unlike eg. Firefox which goes more along the lines of whatever they feel like bumping the version by. More seriously, Firefox has a longer development cycle between major releases but in general they seem to just bump their version roughly proportionally to the amount of time a release was in development. In Pidgin land, major.minor.x releases are just security/bugfix releases, major.minor releases add features, and major releases break API, or something along those lines. 2.5.9 is a separate line from 2.6, and it's just to patch the vulnerability for those that won't move to the 2.6 line right away.
Nonono, you don't get it. 2.5.9 contains the bug fix for people/distros who don't want to move to a new major release. 2.6.0 was released, but it had a separate bug, so 2.6.1 was released later that day to fix that bug. Either way, most people should be safe, since 2.6.0 hardly had a chance to be recommended.
Err, the bug was already fixed and no vulnerable builds were even built for Windows. And incidentally, it'd be easier to just use the WinPidgin build environment fetcher script and cygwin or msys (I prefer msys) than try to compile it with eclipse, although once you have the environment set up eclipse should be able to use it as a Makefile project.
Well, if you enable the Release Notifications plugin it will tell you about updates. I did once post to the mailing list about adding an auto-update feature, but since Pidgin is multiplatform and a built-in autoupdate doesn't make sense on Linux with package managers, the idea was rejected. But really, the Release Notifications plugin is more or less good enough.
So 2.5.9 is a stability release for distros/maintainers who don't want to upgrade to 2.6.0 for whatever reason. 2.6.0 was released at the same time as 2.5.9 but a bug was immediately found so then they released 2.6.1.
I think you can get free Ubuntu stickers from Canonical, actually. I have one on my laptop, although a friend ordered them and it was a while ago so I don't know if they still do it.
On a related note, I've had kernel panics while installing Arch Linux. Not a knock against Arch at all, I'm really interested in getting it on my machine but the fact is that bad/broken drivers will lock up any OS, and a BSOD is always a hardware issue by design. The only time I've seen a BSOD in the past 8 years or so was recently when I was undervolting my laptop to reduce the heat, but I expected it to happen anyway.
Err, I'm not sure if you were aware, but ARM is on tons of smartphones and PDA type devices and some of them have 288MB of RAM. ARM isn't just for microcontrollers.
This whole thread is hilarious, because I was actually thinking about this last night and I hadn't seen this. I think ARM has a better chance than you think though- Cortex A8 has similar IPC to Atom, sure, but Cortex A9 brings out of order execution and dual cores to ARM, so I think it could really give Atom a run for its money. And the best part is that it'll probably use an order of magnitude less power than Atom. I can't wait for ARM to become a viable desktop platform, and I guess at least with Linux it already is. Once ARM gets fast enough and Microsoft gets some sense and ports Windows to ARM, with perhaps some x86 emulation for "legacy" applications (I want to play Starcraft on ARM, silly, I know) it will be awesome.
Mmm, will do at some point.
Ugly is subjective. On the other hand, I don't know myself but I've seen people mention some feature in VB.Net that isn't in C# every time it comes up that VB.Net is inferior.
Are you serious? File searching was always several orders of magnitude slower than the indexed search in Vista. In XP, I've had the thing open for over an hour looking for a file, whereas with Vista I type the name and get the file almost instantly. I've never had the XP search work usefully for me, and I think I and many people would like to know what you and your coworkers are smoking.
Uh, you're misinformed, if anything, since the Vista rendering system is actually GPU accelerated unlike XP, so it should be faster as long as you have a GPU that isn't more than 5 years old or something. A lot of the stupid things that used to happen in XP, like one application freezing and then dragging another application over it would "paint" the second application over the first, doesn't happen with DWM. It's a technically superior system. The classic style might be fast, but IIRC it's still in Vista and 7 so I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
I've been looking into Arch for a while now, because its ideals seem to appeal to me, but for some reason I always get kernel panics during the install. Do you have any idea what the problem might be? I should just post on the Arch forums, but I'm too lazy to make an account and I've already got a Slashdot account so I might as well ask here.
Is it an HP laptop made in the past couple years with an nVidia chipset? It's widely known now that a lot of them are defective and poorly engineered, which leads to crappy heat dissipation. I'm typing this from another HP laptop with a defective nVidia chipset and "normal" temperatures on this are 50-70C for the CPU and 68-90C for the GPU, which is just insane considering it's a several generations old crappy IGP (Geforce 6150). Even my desktop GPU, which is based on possibly the most power hungry GPU generation (Radeon R600) idles at "only" 50C. The problem with the nVidia chipsets is that the heatsink doesn't actually make contact with the GPU, which is just retarded. And to compound problems, they used some crappy solder that can actually melt at temperatures that the GPU actually can achieve (I think around 100C), which causes the wifi to fail among other things. I agree, I'm also never buying an nVidia again because I've been running my CPU at 800mhz for the past few months to avoid the solder coming off and completely hosing my system. I think HP is fine when they don't use shitty nVidia chipsets, and probably newer nVidia chipsets are fine too, but their handling of this situation has been absolutely horrible.
I agree, anyone who says that learning language X will screw up a person for lifetime is an idiot. The only people who would be "screwed up" are people who aren't good at programming in the first place. And on another note, Java and C# are pretty damn good languages, and even VB.net is supposedly pretty good if you actually give it a chance. I haven't tried it myself, but it's orders of magnitude better than VB6, which is what most people think of when they diss VB.
What are the design flaws? That said, if Norton and McAfee are still doing well now then they'll probably be able to survive this as well, because there have been much better free alternatives to their bloatware and they still seem to be extant. That said, the Symantec online virus database is pretty handy, but their client software is horrible. After switching to Avast, my computers booted 30 seconds faster. It seems like this Security Essentials thing is similarly lower on resource usage than Norton et al; perhaps a surprise coming from Microsoft, but a welcome alternative nonetheless.
Yeah, too much boilerplate is my main complaint with JNI. Never used P/Invoke or much .Net at all though.
That looks pretty cool. I guess part of the problem for me before was that I didn't really have any C experience the last time I tried JNI. I was just trying to compile a small DLL to read an analog sensor from Java where someone else had written the code, and it was just a huge mess. At least now I have more experience with C so I could have figured it out more easily, but the fact remains that it's still a kludgy situation.